In short, they are looking for not just customer experience but an overarching customer care. If a company delivers this, in return it can harvest bounties grander than customer retention: satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

Customer care is a complex set of measures aimed at creating a personalized, responsive and proactive environment. Getting it up and running used to be a hard job that required a plethora of disparate tools – until SAP C/4HANA, also known as SAP Customer Experience, was introduced.   

Previously marketed as SAP Hybris, the software was reinvented in 2018 as a suite of four Service Cloud solutions – for commerce, marketing, customer service, and sales – with a single UI, data model, and the underlying AI named SAP Leonardo. The key goal of the updated platform is to deliver a 360-degree customer view – the number-one prerequisite for outstanding customer care. So today we will have a good look at what’s under the hood of this advanced AI-powered solution and how it can promote customer care enablement.

Be Wherever Customers Need You

Gone are the times when the tried-and-true phone sufficed as the only medium of support; even adding a chatbot to the website won’t save the day anymore. According to Salesforce, modern customers use up to ten channels to communicate with a company, which means that your service teams must be accessible via nine of them at least – from 24/7 chatbots to social media and WhatsApp – to keep up.

Customer care implies not only omnichannel support but also deep personalization of all customer interactions. The research by Zendesk shows that 42% of consumers blame their bad experience on being forced to explain the problem to each new support rep over and over again. The customers of today won’t tolerate being treated like an ID number, and in the majority of cases will leave after the respective experience. 

Beyond that, customers hate being bothered for nothing but would greatly appreciate if brands predicted their future needs and sent valuable notification and suggestions. For example, this could be a reminder from a contact lens retailer that their customer’s current product will expire in five days, together with the reorder link attached. 

All this may seem like a hard challenge to shoulder in one go, yet SAP Service Cloud from the SAP C/4HANA suite provides the necessary features to cover today’s customer care requirements.

SAP Service Cloud

With SAP Service Cloud, you can orchestrate a seamless and holistic customer care experience. Integrated with the rest of the SAP C/4HANA suite, it provides support teams with an immediate access to all the customer information available in the system, from warranty documentation on purchases to transaction history. The solution puts an end to information silos, which have been traditionally obstructing support reps’ performance, and provides them with the vital context to personalize customer interactions.

SAP Service Cloud also includes an AI chatbot available 24/7 to answer customers’ questions and resolve their problems. Thanks to advanced natural language processing capabilities, the bot renders near-human communication, so the conversation feels natural to the customer. The AI can also take uncomplicated or routine actions in real time, but if the situation requires a live agent’s involvement, it will automatically transfer the task and the full conversation history to the appropriate support representative so that no context is lost.

SAP’s artificial intelligence system Leonardo is a very potent instrument, and the company has a lofty agenda to adapt it for proactive customer support. According to Jens Trotzky, Head of AI Technology for SAP Support, the work is already underway. The company’s AI experts are collaborating on “highly support-specific innovations” that are aimed at improving the relevance of automated customer interaction and strengthening brands’ credibility with their customers.

Help Customers Help Themselves

Until recently, self-service has been a blatantly overlooked aspect of customer care. Meanwhile, the internet and smartphones made consumers more independent and accustomed to getting information and answers in just a few clicks. As a result, customer support expectations changed drastically: now customers want the opportunity to solve product or service issues via self-service portals. 

The best thing about self-service portals is that they prove to be cost-effective to businesses. Do-it-yourself support costs very little compared to live support service. All this makes self-help a win-win solution that responds to customers’ behavior tendencies and curbs customer support costs. With that in mind, let’s explore what customer self-service capabilities SAP C/4HANA has to offer. 

SAP Knowledge Central by MindTouch

Knowledge Central is a third-party SAP tool for setting up both internal and customer-oriented knowledge portals. Flawlessly integrated into SAP C/4HANA, it allows companies to deliver high-quality illustrative self-help materials and neatly organize them into an accessible knowledge hub. This tool offers advanced features such as content ranking and natural language search, which significantly reduces customers’ effort and drives their loyalty.

SAP Jam Collaboration

SAP Jam Collaboration is a more multi-faceted solution than the previous one. Apart from providing the ground for a SAP Service Cloud-integratable knowledge base, it gives customers content contribution and discussion options. Letting your audience tell their stories or voice their concerns is a great way to demonstrate you care about what they have to say. 

To Wrap It Up

Straightforward, one-size-fits-all customer support has no place in today’s environment where customers expect highly-personalized and innovative care. Customer care is indeed a more demanding activity to arrange and maintain, but offers a viable competitive advantage as a payoff.

SAP С/4HANA offers an all-in-one solution to the challenges of providing personalized customer experience and is especially favorable for customer care setups. Each tool outlined in the article serves its individual purpose, but all of them are cross-integrated within a solid corporate ecosystem and can be accessed from a single interface. So, if you have decided to transform your customer support strategy into the next-generation customer care, it’s worth considering the SAP С/4HANA option.

The post A Cross-over to Customer Care with SAP Customer Experience appeared first on SiteProNews.

The global marketing-related data market was valued at $26 billion in 2019, with $15 billion spent in the US only. As BI implementation is only going to become more pervasive, business owners are looking for worthy cases for their data-driven marketing investments, and many recognize targeting as one of the most promising areas in 2020.

A brief introduction to customer targeting 

Sometimes also called multi-segment marketing, targeting is a strategy that divides the audience into specific groups of customers based on their characteristics. By studying these groups, companies obtain the opportunity to launch highly-personalized marketing campaigns and thus maximize these customers’ positive response. 

Depending on the characteristics chosen, targeting can fall into the following categories:

Demographic segmentation

This one is used to adjust marketing messages to groups of particular age, gender, education, marital status, race, or religion. Related assumptions about targeting may include a middle-aged man who is more likely to be interested in buying a car, or a teenage girl with a high propensity of buying coming-of-age novels.

Psychographic segmentation 

Values, beliefs, interests, and lifestyle can also be used for effective targeting: the same store may diversify its messages for dog and cat lovers, vegans and steak fans, and so on.

Geotargeting

Proximity marketing is one of the best ways to boost sales rates, as it helps brands to communicate with customers at the best time and place. Aspects like a customer’s neighborhood, area code, city, region and country can be helpful in launching an engaging marketing campaign.

Behavioral segmentation 

Shopping patterns, user status, brand interactions and other characteristics of customers are valuable in terms of finding an individual marketing approach to each buyer. This is the basis of effective personalization efforts.

All of these types can be used separately or combined to achieve better results. However, it’s easier said than done. When it comes to practice, an inevitable question arises: how can I make customer targeting effective for my business? 

Tools for successful customer targeting

The key to success lies in choosing an appropriate tool, such as specialized targeting software. Let’s have a closer look at the most efficient ones on the market today.

Adobe Marketing Cloud

Adobe Marketing Cloud stands for a set of Adobe’s digital marketing tools. One of them is Adobe Audience Manager, developed to unify data from a myriad of various sources such as browsing history, social media, and BI systems to deliver a real-time snapshot of customers and provide insights for making advertising as relevant as possible.

Salesforce’s Customer 360 Data Manager

Customer 360 Data Manager collects and unifies data from all the connected external sources of information in order to provide a full view of a customer, identify purchasing trends, and predict customer behavior.

Google Ads

As the world’s leading search engine, Google is the foundation for one of the most well-developed digital display advertising networks, Google Ads. Not only does Google Ads allow promoting your business on search engine results pages, but it also has filters for targeting by gender, location, and many other parameters.

Real-life example of successful customer targeting

Neutrogena, a renowned beauty brand, has nailed its targeting strategy to become a great example of successful marketing campaigns. As the brand realized 75% of their online buyers were only purchasing products within one product segment, they needed a boost to attract new customers and drive sales within other existing product categories. Behavioral targeting was found to be the answer.

The brand analyzed users’ shopping history to identify products they had bought on the internet and show advertisements relevant to the contents of their carts. The approach was aimed at upselling and cross-selling, offering complementary products to loyal customers as well as alternative items from their range for those who had never bought Neutrogena products before. Unobtrusive ads introduced new items to customers as perfect pairings, such as mascara together with makeup removal wipes. The results were impressive — Neutrogena exceeded its benchmarks by 289% with £5.84 return on advertising spend.

Get to know your customer

Today, the digital marketing software range contains a multitude of tools dedicated to gather, analyze and make sense of customer data. The success of any marketing campaign comes down to understanding how to comprehend and make use of this data most effectively when targeting brand messages. In other words, any advertisement that has a potential to convert should have these most important traits: 

• It should contain the right message.
• It should be delivered at the right time. 

Always start with building up the customer profile. The more precise information you can get, the better. What is their age, gender, occupation, marital status and purchase capacity? What websites do they visit? Social networks? Do they prefer email for communication? Once you formulate your customer profile as precise as possible, dive deep into creating pertinent marketing messages for this market of one. 

However, the important thing about data is that it keeps changing. Peoples’ lifestyles are in the state of continuous evolution. It’s crucial to keep track of the changes in your customers’ tastes and needs to stay on top of the competition. At the end of the day, your marketing is only as good as your data management.

The post Targeting Fundamentals: A Marketer’s Essential Toolkit appeared first on SiteProNews.

If you’re considering migrating to Magento 2, then you have to be especially careful. Magento is a complex ecommerce ecosystem that requires dedication. Making the switch will take a significant amount of time, especially if your store is quite large.

But the rewards are promising. Magento is geared toward fast-paced and highly scalable ecommerce. So if your business is on a trajectory to explosive growth, this might be the best solution for you. 

The information below will be particularly useful for store owners who are considering moving from Magento 1 to Magento 2. Still, there are a lot of concepts that will be useful for a store migrating from any other platform. 

Why Do It at All?

If you’re reading this article, you probably already have a basic idea of why you want to move to Magento 2. It won’t hurt to reiterate some of the basics, though: 

Flexibility

With many other commercial platforms, you’re stuck due to their restrictive licensing. At least in one of its incarnations (formerly known as Magento Community Editions), Magento is open-source. This means that you can make your wildest ideas and concepts work as long as they have a sustainable business and tech foundation.

It also means that your developers can tinker around and work their way around any particular problem. The available development documentation is extensive and numerous.

Surely, your business will always be limited by the platform you use. But if you use a platform that is flexible enough to allow you to be the first one out with a feature, product, or a marketing tactic, then you’re ahead of the game. 

Scalability

In Magento, scalability comes in various forms, either through the ability to grow your store without any performance bottlenecks or because it can be connected to practically any data storage solution out there. In many pre-made or turn-key ecommerce solutions, you don’t have this freedom. 

Big Data

Magento 2 can easily turn big data into a formidable business tool. Magento supports Hadoop and other data management solutions that are geared toward a data-driven enterprise. 

B2B

Baked-in B2B features are built with the industry’s best practices in mind. Most other platforms don’t support such a complete B2B package. 

Have a Migration Plan

Magento migration is a massive endeavor, so it’s advisable to create a detailed action plan before you start making moves. Here’s a basic checklist that you can use to build out your strategy: 

Functionality

Do you have the necessary extensions to support your Magento 2 store? Although the platform is pretty robust on its own, you can’t miss out on the opportunity to leverage dozens of attractive functional options found in the Magento ecosystem. Such third-party extensions cover a variety of features you might need to manage your digital inventory, optimize the store for search engines, monitor performance, and more.   

Before migration, learn and map the extensions that will help you replace the functionality within your current store. This might be a high point of contention, as the available Magento 2 extensions may not fully replicate your old platform’s functions. You might have to develop that missing functionality yourself. 

Visuals

You can’t migrate a Magento 1 theme to Magento 2. Needless to say, the same is true if you’re moving from a different platform. Is there a comparable theme for your store in Magento 2? If not, what’s your plan? Consider getting a custom theme if you have the budget, or figure out which third-party theme might have similar UI elements. A lot of them also come pre-packaged with extensions, which will be your way to cutting costs. 

Resources

Can your current provider support the future Magento 2 infrastructure? If not, it might be the perfect time to switch hosting, but that can be a tricky and time-consuming process, so you have to plan that out too. On the contrary, your hosting might support some essential migration features or features specific to Magento 2. In any case, you want to research this before actually starting migration. 

Sandbox

If you have the resources, it can be useful to create a Magento 2 clone. Later, it can serve as your staging environment or a sandbox for various features. You can also use it to train your employees. This way, you’ll have a working Magento 2 version that you can mess around with and not experience any real consequences.

Luckily, there’s the official working action plan that can help you perform Magento migration. It’s specific to Magento 1.x to Magento 2.x migration, but it can also serve as a blueprint for your migration from other platforms.

Timing

You might want to embed this into your Magento migration plan. It will take a while for you to perform the migration and prepare everything for it. The cost of any errors is significant, especially if you’re running an active ecommerce business. 

Plan to have the migration within a period that has the lowest impact on your sales. Usually, that means migrating when you have the lowest sales volume during the year. So if you’re focused on shopping seasons, like retail stores do, then migrating during the winter sales cycle wouldn’t be justifiable.

Training

Even if you’re moving from Magento 1.x to Magento 2, it’s important to get your employees acquainted with the system. These platforms are still quite different, although they do share some basic functionality. 

You can set up a separate staging environment for your teams to ‘play’ with Magento 2, but there’s an even better option.

Your employees probably have some documentation of their workflows. Give them access to Magento and let them run through these documented processes to see what will work in Magento 2 and what won’t. This way, your business users can provide feedback about any issues they encounter in the process. For this, you can use the sandbox install mentioned above.

This can help you find out if there’s a specific feature required for your employees’ workflows but that is missing from the default Magento 2 functionality. You’ll also close the functionality gaps that you might have missed in your migration plan. As a bonus, you’ll have your employees acquainted with the basics of using Magento’s back-office.

Your team has to be able to conduct business as usual because even if your Magento migration proceeds smoothly, the business side has to be well prepared for it. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know how to change your payment details because we just moved to Magento 2 and I can’t get it to work for me.’ This kind of excuse from your employees won’t cut it for your customers. 

Security

Magento 2 is self-hosted. This bit is important if you’re moving from a hosted solution, like Shopify. With Magento 2, you’ll have to take care of data security and any possible data breaches on your own. While there are solutions that will protect you from payment fraud, there aren’t that many similar solutions for your backend infrastructure. Data breaches are the bane of modern ecommerce, and your customers deserve to be safe.

For this, have a security plan in place and make sure that your servers are well-protected. Always use additional authentication methods for your backend. Make sure that you have all the latest Magento 2 patches installed before you launch the store once the migration is finished. It’s convenient that Magento is always on time with their security updates. 

Beware of SEO Bottlenecks

This works for any platform and any migration, not just Magento 2, but it’s still important to mention, especially if you do migrate from Magento 1. Chances are, you’re currently using some third-party solution for your SEO optimization.

It’s highly likely that the solution is not easily portable, which can lead to some serious SEO bottlenecks for your site. If you rely on search traffic, you have to be extremely cautious. You have to have a separate SEO migration plan that takes into account all of the technicalities, redirects, and other SEO-sensitive issues. 

Conclusion

Magento migration is a robust and complicated project. If you and your development team don’t take it seriously enough, the consequences for your business might be disastrous.

It doesn’t mean that you don’t have to move. Magento 2 is incredibly flexible and sophisticated. It’s important to remember that global brands like Liebherr, Canon, Burger King, and SEAT don’t just use Magento 2 because there were no other options. They use it because it provides business value beyond some of the less customizable platforms. On top of it all, it’s open-source and has a passionate and dedicated community of developers. 

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